By Mary Hallan FioRito [Chicago-based Cardinal Francis George Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.], Chicago Tribune, June 17, 2019
To the Editors:
In 1962, Archbishop Joseph Rummel of New Orleans announced that New Orleans’ Catholic schools would officially desegregate the next school year. He threatened excommunication for Catholic politicians who supported racist laws that would have forbidden Catholic school integration.
The unborn, too, “have rights as children in the House of the Lord.” Bishop Paprocki, like Archbishop Rummel before him, rightly came to the defense of those who need someone to speak for them.
Outraged, a group of Catholics who wanted to maintain segregated schools wrote to Rome and requested that the pope stop Rummel. The Vatican’s reply? The politicians were reminded that racism had been condemned by the Catholic Church as “a major evil” and that students of color had “rights as children in the House of the Lord.”
Archbishop Rummel stood his ground and formally excommunicated three Catholic politicians who had voted against integration. Within two years, New Orleans’ Catholic schools had become almost fully integrated.
So it was both confusing and surprising to see the Rev. Stan Chu Ilo claim in his op-ed (“Keep Holy Communion out of the Abortion Debate,” June 11) that Springfield Bishop Thomas Paprocki’s declaration that the public actions of House Speaker Michael Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton made them ineligible to receive Communion was not “an appropriate and effective means of engaging Catholic politicians in their public role as representatives of all citizens.”
Ilo claims that the church would have to “ban a third of its members from Holy Communion” because varying polls show that a percentage of Catholics support some legal abortions (opinions largely depending on the gestational age of the unborn child). However, church teaching is clear that privately holding a position in opposition to the church on abortion is one thing, but championing, and then voting for, laws expanding abortion is a different issue altogether.
Ilo states that the Reproductive Health Act “legalized taxpayer funding of abortions,” but taxpayer-funded abortion coverage for all Medicaid recipients and all state workers was approved in 2017 and signed by then-Gov. Bruce Rauner. What the act does is expand abortion up until the moment of birth, an extreme position opposed by the majority of Illinois residents, Catholic and non-Catholic alike. ([Chicago Tribune] Editor’s note: The act repeals the state’s Partial-Birth Abortion law, but a federal law banning the late-term procedure except to save a mother’s life remains in place.)
The unborn, too, “have rights as children in the House of the Lord.” Bishop Paprocki, like Archbishop Rummel before him, rightly came to the defense of those who need someone to speak for them.
Mary Hallan FioRito, Chicago-based Cardinal Francis George Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
Article first appeared at: https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/letters/ct-vp-voice-letters-061819-story.html
An expanded depiction of Bishop’s Rummel’s courageous defense of his Church can be found at: http://romereturn.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-orleans-1962-archbishop-rummels.html
Mary Hallan FioRito last spoke at our Catholic Citizens of Illinois Forum Luncheons, on January 11, 2019. Her topic was: “St. Pope Paul VI and Humanae Vitae: Divine Intervention?”